It’s All One Thing #10: Labyrinth as Speed

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Outside, two days after the blizzard
it is snowing again and someone says
this second Nor-easter has stalled
and will snow all night so that we will set
a new record for most snow in one month.

The sextons have been promised they can
go home two hours early like the rest of the staff
so we will be leaving at seven not eight PM.
However at 6:30 I am still the only one present
and have already meditated as long as I can
and done a whole litany of stretching and calisthenics
when lo and behold there’s little Bill tottering down
the stairs from the dim back area of the stage saying, “I’m late”.

By the time he does his ritual clothes change
and toddled to the bathroom and back again
there’s just time to say “this is Labyrinth as speed”
where we spin through the hairpin turns and glide
down those long voluptuous curves that erupt
in vistas of blur and leave us two forms aware
of each other and somehow making a show
in a performance whose audience is no one
and everyone and we are both so old and so young
that the whole world spins in the holy universe
where the pattern that we walk together
is the life that we live together and the world
is the universe is the Labyrinth we walk together.

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.